Beachball after updating to Sierra

After updating to Sierra, my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15", Late 2013) starting going to the beach.

Failure to wake: At least twice after opening the lid, nothing happened. Holding the power button down was required. Nothing in the logs
Beachball while trying to login in: At least twice, with the lid open while at the password prompt, I could type one character in the password field in the login screen, then the beachball
Beachball while in use: about 90 minutes after rebooting, the beachball appeared while using Firefox. Safari, Acrobat, and the console were also running.

Note to Apple: If your OS crashes without a log, then you have an OS problem or a hardware problem. The kernel should always be able to write a crash log on its way down. If a user process is causing this, then you have a critical kernel bug. Anyone who does not understand this should not be doing support.

One idea here is to look at which non-Apple kernel extensions are running.

bash-3.2$ kextstat | grep -v com.apple
Index Refs Address Size Wired Name (Version) UUID <Linked Against>
138 0 0xffffff7f831f2000 0x14000 0x14000 com.intel.kext.intelhaxm (6.0.3) 50449AFC-F7C6-38A0-B820-233E8A050FD6 <7 5 4 3 1>
143 0 0xffffff7f83206000 0x15000 0x15000 com.microsoft.kext.scep_kac (405.02.32f01) A00628EA-3CEB-79F5-1DAC-6D6996D35111 <5 4 3 1>
bash-3.2$

[$[Get Code]]

This suggests that updating Microsoft's SCEP could be a good idea.

Uninstall scep on the Mac
Sierra compatible version of SCEP for Mac now available (Berkeley) says that a Sierra version is available, see https://software.berkeley.edu/SCEP

USB Does not work with iPhone 5s after updating to Sierra.

I upgraded a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15", Late 2013) to macOS Sierra 10.12.3 and the USB stopped providing power to my iPhone ME306LL/A (iPhone 5s), running an OS before iOS 10.2.1.

I tried two different cables and the phone did not receive power and the Mac did not recognize the phone. The same cables worked fine being plugged in to another USB source (an Intel NUC).

I also tried plugging in both cables into a new, clean Sierra installation on the same hardware (MacBook Pro (Retina, 15", Late 2013)) and the same thing happened.

I then plugged in a different phone, an iPhone 5se, and that phone was recognized by the first machine!

I then plugged the 5s in and was asked if I wanted to upgrade the phone iOS, which I did. The phone now has iOS 10.2.1.

After the upgrade the phone was also recognized on the second machine that has the clean installation.